How to Believe in Yourself

SUMMARY

When we struggle or lose faith, how can we rekindle our belief in ourselves?

Try these five strategies:

1. Get Momentum. It’s the small wins that give us confidence for greater achievements. Seek to achieve just three goals every day. These don’t have to be earth-moving, life-changing goals—as you get more wins you’ll start feeling better about yourself and be ready to start working bigger goals.
2. Integrate the Wins into Your Identity. After you get a win, integrate it. This means you should take a moment to appreciate what you’ve done, to give yourself credit, to be thankful for any support you received from others. This won’t happen automatically. You literally need to schedule time each night to reflect on the day, remember the small wins, and feel them. That’s the psychological secret to believing in yourself more – allowing yourself time to continually notice and feel the wins so you can appreciate your efforts, strength and momentum.
3. Get feedback. If you truly doubt yourself, then go ask those you know and trust for some feedback. Ask, “What do you think I’m good at? What do you think makes me a good person? What should I work on to get better?” Their words will inspire or at least direct you. Sometimes we need that outside perspective.
4. Prime the emotions. What do you really want to feel every day? Happiness? Joy? Fun? These emotions can be generated in your mind without any external achievement. Just sit still with your eyes closed and summon the emotions you want to experience. Or read an inspirational passage from your favorite book, speaking aloud with real emotion and power. Try something like these ideas every morning to set yourself up for a great day.
5. Love yourself. You are unique among the seven billion-plus people on this planet. Recognize and honor that uniqueness. You don’t have to make excuses or dismiss your powers or heart. It’s okay to feel pride and love for yourself. Take a moment now and just be grateful for who you are, for your desire to improve, for the blessings of your life and breath. Love that you are alive.

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INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE

FULL TRANSCRIPT

I’m often asked “Brendon, how can I believe in myself more?”

Sometimes, we get knocked down. Sometimes, we just struggle for days or weeks or months or decades and we have that like “I just lost faith in myself somewhere. I was so confident in my teens or my twenties or my thirties or whenever and now I lost my mojo, man. I just don’t, I don’t have the confidence and the vibe and the pop and I just, I lost faith in myself. What can I do?”

And I don’t have a pat easy answer for that, but I got five ideas here that might just help you. I’m outside here at my writer’s villa in Oregon. I thought, “You know what? Why don’t we just talk about this.” It’s a tough topic but let’s take it on so forgive the sounds of nature if we got them, forget the sounds of anything going by but let’s rock and roll.

Number one way to start to believe in yourself is: Momentum.

Now I know off the bat, if you really hate yourself right now, you’re like, “Thanks Brendon, I got no momentum. That’s why I hate myself.” So, hold on. I will get to the mindset stuff. I will get to the emotional stuff. But sometimes, believing in yourself is just tactically winning a little bit each day.

Just a little bit of a win can give you that dope meaning that says, “Oh good job. Reward. I feel better.” It can be a very simple neurological pay off of just achieving a couple of small goals and as you’ve heard me say, anytime you’re dealing with difficulty, it can be just simple things but it’s got to be momentum. So whatever you’re doing in your life, if you got a job, think about “What small things can I do tomorrow to move ahead?”

If you’re dealing with a difficulty in a relationship, what would be a simple win? A simple moment of appreciation, just something they could say or you could say to put some more pop and energy back into that relationship. Just one smile, one kiss, one good date can change the game for you.

Also, if it’s just something simple you can do in your own health. Look, sometimes going to the gym and leaving, you feel a little better. Just a little bit of movement has been proven to change people’s states of minds and their emotions too. So, just get to the gym or get a little bit of small goal setting, getting a little bit of momentum for it in any area of your life, that’s at least a beginning and then, do it again the next day. Don’t just go and crush it tomorrow and then be a jerk and do nothing and watch seven seasons of Netflix on the next day. Momentum is daily. Little things every single day adds up to greatness.

Second big piece and this is more to the emotional side, integration, my friend, integration. People don’t believe in themselves. It’s often, it’s not that there hasn’t been evidence that they shouldn’t believe in themselves. They’ve had some wins; they’ve had some goals that came true. They made the magic happen but they never integrated the win, they never had a good thing happen and they sat there at the end of the night thinking about that good thing that happened and allowing it to come into their heart, allowing whatever they did to give themselves credit for it, permission to feel good about it to say, “You know what? I did this today. It went well today. That worked today.”

And to integrate that win, integrate that success, integrate that moment into their heart, into their identity as a human being, what happens is most of us, we knock off the checklist and did it, and five years later after all these "did it, made it happen, crushed it," we feel the same about ourselves.

We have the same level of confidence, the same level of belief in ourselves because we didn’t allow those things to enter our psyche, enter our spirit as strength.

We didn’t. We took, we had momentum externally but we didn’t have any momentum internally building our character and our strength. We never achieved that sense of pride or ownership of what we did. We didn’t own that we did it. So, we never got stronger. That means, you need an integration practice.

At the end of the day, just sit down, at the end of the day and go, “What worked today? What did I do today? What little thing should I allow myself a little bit of credit for? What did I say that was nice or kind? What did I send away that I got done? What did I finish? What goal did I move a little closer to?”

At the end of the day, allow that to come in. This isn’t about just pepping ourselves up and saying, “I’m awesome. I’m awesome. I’m awesome,” with no evidence. I’m saying, you know we got some momentum. Integrate that now. Own that. You did the work today. You fought the good fight. You finished the day. You’re still alive. You know what you needed to go do tomorrow. Integrate that success. Give yourself that credit. You will develop that strength of spirit that’s so important.

If you don’t believe in yourself after all of that, get some feedback. Most people fear this. When you don’t believe in yourself, you don’t want any feedback because they might say you’re stupid or you suck or you’re ugly and you know what, if they do that you’re getting feedback from the wrong people. Sometimes, it’s necessary to get feedback from the people that we love. Feedback from people we know, like and trust and just say, “Hey, could I ask you a question? What am I doing that you are seeing that seems right? Because right now I don’t feel like I’m doing anything right.”

And they will say, “What are you talking about? No, you’re smart. You’re good. You’ve been doing this.”

Sometimes, people can give us feedback and help us see that we are doing better than we think.

Maybe you’re a perfectionist or maybe you grew up with somebody who pushed so hard on you, you never integrated any successes. Sometimes, you need somebody pushing hard at you and saying, “Good job kid. You’re doing all right. I’m proud of you. I see that you’re working hard here. I see that you’re trying.”

So, sometimes it’s about getting around a new social circle of people who are strivers, who are also struggling, who are fighting hard, who can give you that feedback and say, “Good job. Keep at it.”

And if you do get negative feedback over and over and over, assess, is it real? Do you need to change and shift and get better? And if you do, don’t hate that, don’t get mad at that. Take that as a challenge. Instead of taking things as a insult and crying over people’s comments, go, “Huh, you know what? That’s got some basis in reality. I’m going to take that as a challenge. I’m going to develop myself. Not to prove them wrong but to get better.” Allow yourself that. Allow that feeling to come from the feedback.

Next stuff, I love this one, it’s so simple:

It’s just priming the emotions that we want to experience in our life.

What does that mean? It means, doing something in advance so we can feel it and here is what I mean by that. In the morning, every single day, see I want to be motivated and driven. I want to feel grateful for life. I want to have a sense of passion about the day.

But you know what? Some days, I wake up and I feel like crap. So, what am I going to do? Go through the day and just allow my impulsive feelings to tell me to feel like crap all day and lose multiple days. No. I’m going to say, “Okay, I recognize I feel like crap. Why? I didn’t sleep well or why? I got this bad attitude right now. I’m going to change it.

In the morning, I do an affirmation practice and visualization practice where what I do is I pick up something; every single morning I do this. I grab a little, just a couple of paragraphs. Maybe I read from my Bible, maybe I read from one of my books or another book. It’s a passage. I have a bunch of passages in my note section of my phone too if I’m on the road and I will just read it out loud, pretending that I’m like in my most passionate, happy place in my life.

So I will be reading out loud some Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I will be reading out loud some Martin Luther King. I will be reading out loud some Napoleon Hill or I will be reading out loud some Earl Nightingale. As loud as I can and that voice activates a power which activates an emotion, which activates my day. So, you just got to prime the emotion or sometimes, I will be in the shower and I will say, “What can I do today or what I’m going to do today that would bring a laugh? What can I do today that I’m excited for?”

And I will just get my energy up. Like don’t wait to have good energy in life. Remember, as I always say, the power plant doesn’t have energy. It generates it. You don’t have happiness, you generate it. So, choose to prime the emotions you want to experience in life. Cultivate it. Summon your energy versus hoping a good one lands on you and you will start to feel better about yourself and about life.

And the last big one, you knew I was going to go there. Love. You know, you already know a thing about Love Yourself and maybe in some ways, you’ve never allowed that. You’ve never noticed the beautiful things you’ve done in your life. So, you’ve never allowed yourself to love yourself.

But at some point, you’ve got to recognize that there’s a love that’s beyond you and beyond me and beyond your actions and that love is whatever bought us here alive today. Some would say, “It’s god’s will and god’s love. For some people it’s the randomness of the universe. Some people it’s nature. Some people it’s whatever.

But there is something way beyond us and there is a way to access that and a way to honor that and the way to honor that is to recognize that you are unique about 7 billion people no one is like you specifically and at least take that as a moment of saying, “Okay, I am meant to live my uniqueness. I am supposed to love the things that make me odd and weird. I am supposed to love the things that make me strong. I was made this way so let me honor what’s good about that and what’s not good about that. Let me work on that. Let me set a schedule to get better at that so that I can not only honor what I have been given but I can give something back too by getting better.”

And that aspect of doing that, that brings in so much joy and so much strength in our life is love. Loving ourselves, loving the process and of course the greatest way to believe in ourselves is to love other people that they become so grateful for us that they give us some of that feedback, that there is so much appreciation and love and joy in the moment with others that you can’t help but just feel that vibe that there is an emotional contagion.

When other people around you are feeling loved and cared for and excited about life, it’s hard not to rub off on you a little bit and you start to say, “You know what? Life isn’t so bad and you know what? I deserve to feel good here right now too” and you know what? You start to getting some momentums, some wins, you integrate those wins, you get some feedback to get better and all of a sudden, you start to believe in yourself again. All of a sudden you start to live, The Charged Life.